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Sunday, July 23, 2017

A short debunking of David Duke on the Holocaust

Author: Sergey Romanov

This post deals with chapter 12 of David Duke's Jewish Supremacism (2002 edn.).

I skip his initial musings (only noting that he exaggerates the Soviet death toll significantly) and begin from p. 272.
Here Duke repeats the fraudulent Dresden death toll of 100,000. In fact about 25,000 died, and it has been known for some time (see overview in Abschlussbericht der Dresdner Historikerkommission).

p. 273: Duke brings up a self-published book Germany Must Perish! by a nutjob Theodore N. Kaufman. This otherwise insignificant book is notable for being used in the Nazi propaganda and doesn't prove anything otherwise. Of course, Duke continues the Nazi propaganda effort.

p.275: brings up Rassinier, calling him a "Holocaust survivor" despite him not being Jewish. Rassinier was not in any camp with the gas chambers, so his opinion on the gas chambers in other camps are irrelevant.

p. 276: Duke then predictably tackles Wiesel, who, contrary to his implication, was not any sort of a key witness. Duke lies by omission about the reasons Wiesel and his father chose to stay. It becomes very clear in the long citation from Wiesel's book posted here.

He also mentions Wiesenthal and his suicide attempt, and wonders why the Nazis nursed him back to life. Here Duke lies by omission once again, "forgetting" to mention that the Nazis wanted to interrogate him, probably about the underground (see for example T. Segev, Simon Wiesenthal. The Life and Legends, 2010, p. 57).

So basically in a chapter called "Three famous victims of the Holocaust" Duke only tackles witnesses of tertiary importance at best. Clearly Duke's research is non-existent, as is his honesty. He claims here that the details he points out are inconsistent with the Holocaust, yet they fully are.

p. 277: he pulls out the incoherent Britannica argument, debunked here. Duke seems to gather his "key" knowledge from general-purpose encyclopedias. So much for his "research".

p. 278: good old memes about Wiesel not mentioning the gas chambers (debunked here) and mentioning hearsay of geysers of blood (see here).

What comes next should be quoted at length:

Other impertinent questions occurred to me. Did the Nazis, while in the midst of the war effort, really construct huge and complex gas chambers; transport millions of Jews to camps, and exterminate their victims in this manner? If their intention was to kill them, wouldn’t bullets, costing a few cents apiece, have killed them more efficiently and eliminated the huge expense and logistical nightmare of transportation, housing, food and medical care? I asked myself, If the Nazis really intended to kill all the Jews, why would they even need to build concentration camps?

There is nothing complex about the gas chambers (in its simplest form it's just a room with openings for introducing gas; the most "complex" part is ventilation, which however was already present in the morgues), they are much more efficient for mass murder than shootings and inflicted less psychological burden on fewer Nazis (gas chambers were preferred after some Nazi shooters began to have psychological breakdowns after shooting Jews, including women and children, on the occupied Soviet territories). And, of course, the transportation was necessary since, very simply, the Nazis would not have been killing Jewish families in front of the Frenchmen or the Belgians. Relative secrecy was important. Establishing the work camps was for exploiting the Jewish workers until they became unfit for work. Sure, eventually all the Jews had to be killed, but nobody said it would happen immediately - not until the Nazis exploited the Jewish slave labor first.

So Duke's questions betray simple lack of common sense.

Moreover, since the Jews were deported wholesale from the countries of their origin, including the Jews unable to work (i.e. most of them according to the Nazi standards) the question that Duke cannot answer is what exactly happened to these Jews unable to work. We know they were not (with minuscule exceptions) in any of the concentration camps. And they were certainly were not deported further to the East. So what happened to them? Where are these missing Jews?

p. 282: of course no denier screed would be complete without an attack on Höß' testimony. Duke notes the change in number by the Auschwitz Museum. But curiously he never mentions that Höß also changed his number! In Poland he revised the estimate down to about 1 million - all on his own, which we know because the official Communist figure was 4 million. We now know the number to be roughly accurate. See Van Pelt's report.

In the same time period in which he denounced his older death toll estimate and described his initial torture, Höß also confirmed the mass gassings. Given the changes mentioned above that were totally against what the official Polish Communist line was, it is clear that his Polish statements were made without duress.

p. 283: Duke repeats the usual meme:

Hoess also confessed to things that were impossible. For example, he alleged that after hundreds of victims were gassed with hydrogen cyanide, workers immediately entered the nonvented rooms and removed the bodies without wearing gas masks. He described how they smoked and ate snacks as they performed their task.

Faurisson observed that Höss saw the Sonderkommando dragging bodies while eating and smoking, they were obviously not wearing gas masks–probably because of their “indifferent coolness.” In short, there was an inexplicable contradiction between the extreme toxicity of the gas chamber and the behaviour of the Sonderkommandos. Adding to the collection the official instruction manual of Zyklon B, which stipulated that spaces that had been fumigated with the agent should air out for at least 20 hours, Faurisson came to the conclusion that Höss obviously did not know what he was writing about, and that his testimony was worthless.700 Yet on examination, it is clear that his “Ajax Method” did not do the texts justice. The second quotation taken from Höss occurs in the middle of a paragraph that deals with the “strange” behaviour of the Sonderkommando. It did not discuss the extermination procedure in any logical order. When Höss mentions that the Sonderkommando ate or smoked while dragging bodies, he did not say “while dragging bodies from the gas chambers.” In fact, there was a lot of body-dragging in Auschwitz: in crematoria 2 and 3 bodies were dragged within the incineration halls from the elevator doors to the ovens, in crematoria 4 and 5, bodies were dragged not only from the gas chambers to the morgue, but also from the morgue to the incineration room, and in the case of the open air burning of the buried corpses in the late summer and fall of 1942, bodies were dragged from the opened mass graves to the incineration pits. At no time did the Sonderkommando need a gas mask for this awful job.

The Jewish soap was just a rumor in which many people (mostly non-historians) sincerely believed, but in this section Duke introduces the Danzig soap presented at Nuremberg which was both real and not made of Jews. A typical tactic.

p. 288: Duke outright lies that the investigation of Spanner showed no human soap having been made, for Spanner himself testified:

I repeat my statement given at the police and add: At the Danzig Anatomic Institute soap was manufactured to a limited extent from human fat. This soap was only used for the manufacturing of joint preparations.

Having established that the soap was real, the German investigations could not prove that people were killed for this soap (it was probably merely a by-product of maceration), so the whole thing amounted to maximally a desecration of corpses, something no prosecutor would have bothered with in those circumstances.

p. 290: Duke lies about Piper having admitted that the crematorium building was built after the war. It was a partially botched reconstruction, it was not built from scratch as such phrasing implies. More on that see Debunking David Cole's Auschwitz video.

p. 292: the tired old "they changed the plaque but did not change the Holocaust death toll" denier innumeracy debunked here.

This next lie merits quoting it in full (I bolded a few words for the reasons which will become clear immediately):

Interestingly, in perhaps the most authoritative and exhaustive book on Auschwitz yet published, Auschwitz: 1270 to Present by Robert Jan Van Pelt and Deborah Dwork, it is admitted by the two Jewish Holocaust authors that the gas chamber at the main Auschwitz camp and the one shown to tourists was a fake built by the Polish Communists long after the war.

Needless to say, the authors "admitted" no such thing. And it is doubtful that Duke even read what they wrote, since his claim is apparently simply plagiarized from David Irving's misinterpetation of what they wrote.

Van Pelt addressed it at length in The Case for Auschwitz, pp. 120-1:

I was not surprised that Irving had paid particular attention to our discussion of Crematorium 1 in our epilogue:

You quote Broad on pages 301–2 describing, in a 1991 book of memoirs, the “effective gas chamber which could hold 900 people” in the main camp (i.e. Auschwitz I), but on pages 363–4 you confirm that there was never a gas chamber at Auschwitz I, and that the one shown to tourists since the war was a fake built by Polish communists.

The quote is as follows:

The morgue of the crematorium in the main camp had been transformed in September 1941 into an effective gas chamber which could hold 900 people, so there was plenty of room to kill the elderly Jews with ease. Shortly before their arrival, the SS closed off the roads and emptied the offices that had a view of the crematorium. “A sad procession walked along the streets of the camp,” Pery Broad remembered after the war. “All of them had large, yellow Jewish stars on their miserable clothes. Their worn faces showed that they had suffered many a hardship.”
It was not an ideal situation from the camp management perspective, Broad noted. Using the crematorium as a killing station for for a transport of old people interrupted the life of the camp. Broad's superior Maximilian Grabner, who had overseen the whole operation, had even had to run a truck engine to drone out the death cries of the victims. While the Germans had felt no need to camouflage the execution of Polish hostages or resistors “duly” sentenced by a court of justice, the murder of elderly Jews was another matter. It was not a useful deterrent against resistance activities.

On pages 363-364 we wrote the following:

There have been additions to the camp the Russians found in 1945 as well as deletions, and the suppression of the prisoner reception site is matched by the reconstruction of crematorium 1 just outside the north-east perimeter of the present museum camp. With its chimney and its gas chamber, the crematorium functions as the solemn conclusion for tours through the camp. Visitors are not told that crematorium they see is largely a largely a post-war reconstruction. When Auschwitz was transformed into a museum after the war, the decision was taken to concentrate the history of the whole complex in one of its its component parts. The infamous crematoria where the mass murders had taken place were ruins in Birkenau, two miles away. The committee felt that a crematorium was required at the end of the memorial journey, and crematorium 1 was reconstructed to speak of the history of the incinerators at Birkenau. This program of usurpation was rather detailed. A chimney, the ultimate symbol of Birkenau, was re-created; four hatched openings in the roof, as if for pouring Zyklon-B into the gas chamber below, were installed, and two of the three furnaces were rebuilt using original parts. There are no signs to explain these restitutions, they were not marked at the time, and the guides remain silent about it when they take visitors through this building that is presumed by the tourist to be the place where it happened.

When one compares our text to Irving's interpretation of it, it was clear that he was once again involved in a case of misconstruction. We did not 'confirm that there was never a gas chamber at Auschwitz I, and that the one shown to tourists since the war was a fake built by the Polish communists.' Instead, we clearly stated the crematorium was a 'reconstruction,' which is a representation of a situation that had existed earlier that disappeared. As such, a reconstruction was clearly different from a fake, which is would have been a representation of a situation that had never existed. Because the chimney was 're-created' and because 'two of the three furnaces were rebuilt using original parts,' neither the chimney nor the furnaces were fakes either. Given the context of the sentence of all postwar construction at the crematorium as 'restitutions,' it ought to have been clear to Irving that the clause 'four hatched openings in the roof, as if for pouring Zyklon-B into the gas chamber below, were installed' also referred to an attempt to reconstruct the earlier situation.

Compare the bolded parts. Duke clearly took Irving's wording, slightly rephrasing, without fact-checking. Also note Duke's awkward phrasing: "the gas chamber at the main Auschwitz camp and the one shown to tourists was a fake". This resulted from copy-pasting Irving's misinterpretation and deleting the words "that there was never", because while Irving talks about two "different" buildings, Duke talks about one. So Duke plagiarized Irving's whopper.

Duke then jumps to the Death Books of Auschwitz and asks why gassings were not mentioned. Most of those gassed were not registered in Auschwitz so would not have appeared in the books (hence the numbers in the books also don't contradict the total death toll), whereas those of the inmates who were gassed were "executed" without an official trial procedure (unlike many of those who were hanged or shot), so their deaths had to look "natural" in the books.

p. 295: On autopsies - extermination camps were liberated long after gassings had stopped, obviously one wouldn't have expected bodies of the gassed just lying around. How about some common sense?

Duke outright lies about Pressac's argument on Zyklon. For it is exactly Pressac who wrote:

During the trials that were held after the war, the tons of Zyklon-B ordered by the camps were attributed to homicidal use without any verification. By far the greater part (over 95 percent) was destined for delousing (effects and buildings) while only a very small part (less than 5 percent) had been used for homicidal gassings.

p. 298: the Polish forensic study showed the HCN traces in the walls. Homicidal gas chambers and delousing gas chambers had very different gassing regimes so the appearance of the Prussian blue in the latter does not necessitate the same in the former. See here.

Finally Duke simply lies that killing of "millions of people" in Auschwitz is still alleged today. His pseudoscientific argument rested on this lie.

On the Arno Mayer meme see The Mayer Gambit. Mayer is not an expert on Auschwitz in any way, shape or form so what he writes about the state of evidence is irrelevant.

p. 299: Duke outright lies about "hundreds" of Jewish eyewitnesses testifying about Demjanjuk being Ivan the Terrible. About a dozen or so witnesses did indeed mistake him for another man, not "hundreds". This has nothing to do with eyewitness testimonies either, it was the faulty perpetrator identification which is not the same as testimony about goings on in the camps.

Duke further lies that KGB "framed" Demjanjuk. His ID was shown to be authentic. What happened is that the interrogations of other guards by that same KGB came out after the fall of the USSR that showed that Ivan Marchenko, a very different person, was Ivan the Terrible. Needless to say, these interrogations, which helped to prove Demjanjuk's innocence in this case, also proved the Holocaust in Treblinka. Moreover, Demjanjuk was a guard at another extermination camp, Sobibor, as proved by documents.

p. 300: there is nothing strange about differing estimates. The estimates for the Dresden bombing death toll range from 20,000 to 1,000,000. Does that mean it did not take place?

Notably, at the beginning of the chapter Duke cites the laughably exaggerated death tolls of the victims of the Soviet Communists. They are OK in his book.

p. 301: Duke lies about no gas chamber blueprints - those were published by Pressac, among others. And yes, there are other documents too, e.g. the series of documents on the mobile gas chambers (gas vans).

He lies about no documents for the extermination plan.

Just a few quick examples. Hitler's address to the Gau and Reich leaders of 12.12.41:

As concerns the Jewish question, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep. He had prophesied to the Jews that if they once again brought about a world war they would experience their own extermination. This was not just an empty phrase. The World War is there, the extermination of Jewry must be the necessary consequence. This question must be seen without sentimentality. We are not here in order to have sympathy with the Jews, rather we sympathize with our own German people. If the German people have now once again sacrificed as many as 160,000 dead in the Eastern campaign, then the authors of this bloody conflict must pay with their lives.

The accused shall not be punished because of the actions against the Jews as such. The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss. Although the accused should have recognized that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of Kommandos which were set up especially for this purpose, he should be excused for considering himself to have the authority to take part in the extermination of Jewry himself.

Therefore shootings of Jews, which lately have been a task of SD, are acts of the state [Akte des Staates], ordered for extermination of these enemies in a certain manner [der die Austilgung dieser Feinde in einer bestimmten Art und Weise anordnet] and performed in this manner. In order to implement these measures, which the state deems to be necessary, special organs are used. These organs are subject to strict guidelines.
[...]When weighing any exculpatory circumstances it should be taken into account that liquidation of Jews [die Beseitigung der Juden] should not harm the Germans' authority since for these measures there are guidelines given by the state. This especially pertains to the SD activities, since they implement these measures within these guidelines.